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Thursday, March 15, 2007 - Thu, 15 Mar 2007

With these recent improvements, I thought I’d try to see if Behold would now load some of the largest test GEDCOMs I had. These results are for my 3 GHz HP computer with 1 GB of RAM.

The first GEDCOM I used to push Behold with is 20 MB in size, has 841,000 lines in it, 33790 people, and Behold’s Print Preview shows that the Everything Report would have 8274 pages if printed. Version 0.98.8 took 152 seconds to load and used 344 MB of RAM. This has now improved to 34 seconds and 272 MB of RAM.

The largest GEDCOM I have is 47 MB. Previously, Behold wouldn’t load it. Now, it does redline on memory, meaning it is using all the RAM and Cache up and started memory thrashing, but it managed to run to completion taking 8 and a half minutes. The final Everything Report was awesome. It has over 2 and a half million lines in it and contains 198,522 people! Once loaded, Behold handled it well. Movement around is instantaneous, but actions requiring reformatting such as resizing the window do take time. This is, after all, a report that would be 24,344 pages if printed!

I was worried that some numbering limitation in Behold might prevent that many people from being loaded, but nothing like that happened. This means theoretically at least, Behold should be good for a million or more names. A few more improvements, a bit more RAM, and faster computers 2 years hence and I’m sure that will be quite do-able.